Sep 23 2011

Organizational Alignment Via Policy Deployment or Hoshin Planning

From Wikipedia…

Policy Deployment or Hoshin Planning … is a method devised to capture and cement strategic goals as well as flashes of insight about the future and develop the means to bring these into reality.

Policy Deployment or Hoshin Planning … is a Strategic planning/Strategic management methodology, based on a concept popularized in Japan by Professor Kaoru Ishikawa in the late 1950s when he said that ‘each person is the expert in his or her own job and Japanese TQC (Total Quality Control) is designed to use the collective thinking power of all employees to make their organization the best in its field.

More from Wikipedia:

The discipline of hoshin kanri is intended to help an organization:

Focus on a shared goal
Communicate that goal to all leaders
Involve all leaders in planning to achieve the goal
Hold participants accountable for achieving their part of the plan

It assumes daily controls and performance measures are in place. “With hoshin kanri… the daily crush of events and quarterly bottom-line pressures do not take precedence over strategic plans, rather, these short-term activities are determined and managed by the plans themselves.”

In Japanese, hoshin means shining metal, compass, or pointing the direction, kanri means management or control. The name suggests how hoshin planning aligns an organization toward accomplishing a single goal.

Employee Engagement plays a critical role – in providing a process that enables the employees to determine the HOW TO DO THIS.

Not the What to do, or the When to do it – which may be dictated by the customer and/or other factors.

And if the Enterprise is a Learning Organization – too often mistaken by the former Training Department who misappropriated that phrase for their title to hide from the sins of their past – but I digress – then they will capture the Measured Results against the Predicted Results from their Baseline Results and and will figure out what happened – or what didn’t happen that was planned to happen – and what happened that wasn’t planned to happen – and will BOTH capture the Lessons Learned and will disseminate the Lessons Learned – to have any successes AND failures shared.

Some call it celebrating failure – so as to not punish failure – because punished failures (most often through the fault of the system and not individuals or teams – according to Deming later in his life as a 94 to 6% split versus his earlier claims that it was 85 to 15%) get hidden and there is much less of a chance to learn from them much less improve to avoid them in the future.

Capturing Successes and Failures and THEIR Lessons Learned needs to happen Formally and not Informally – DESPITE THE FACT THAT MOST HAPPEN INFORMALLY NOW.

That twisted way of thinking – that just because most things – like most Learning – happens Informally – that that is where the effort is to be expended and the investments made – is – to me – quite ridiculous.

But some managers and leaders buy that. And so it does sell. And therefore it will continue to be sold. To the detriment of all involved – I am quite afraid and quite sure.

My models and methods and thinking on Quality and Performance Improvement – are covered in my new book (below), which is based on many articles and columns published – in prior books (The Quality RoadMap 1994), in my own firms’ newsletters for our clients (1980s through 2007), in a series of columns done for BPTrends and another for PROVEN.